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Lorne Gunter: Lack of safety the main obstacle to Downtown revitalization

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The Downtown Revitalization Coalition (DRC) seems to have found the secret to actually making our city centre more vibrant. It’s a secret that continues to elude city council, administration and planners.

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While council is debating its next four-year budget, the coalition has released a plan in which the focus of Downtown revitalization efforts would be a “targeted” approach to “address persistent public disorder.”

Over the past 10 years, council has approved nearly $2 billion tax dollars for gimmicky solutions, such as renaming Rice Howard Way the Entertainment District, permanently closing streets to build an urban park called Warehouse Park, spending millions on a Meet Me Downtown ad campaign that no one remembers, getting rid of as much public parking as possible and building a $170-million events centre in the fan park immediately east of Rogers Centre.

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Yet none of this has improved or will improve the decay and vacancy Downtown, until the city deals with street crime, transit crime and general disorder.

It’s entirely possible — even likely — that visitors from the suburbs and office workers newly returning to the core will have to step around addicts openly shooting up on street corners, over heaps of human feces on sidewalks and past persistent, aggressive panhandling and the possibility of physical assault.

The city has plans to spend $88 million on “infill infrastructure” Downtown in the coming years. They can build affordable housing and condos and infill until there is no room left Downtown for anything else, and nothing will change until they have first dealt with the DRC’s concerns on public safety.

On March 1, two Edmonton police officers and a transit peace officer were patrolling the Downtown underground LRT when they observed a man openly drinking at the Corona LRT station. As they approached him, the man pulled a knife and attacked the trio of law enforcement officers.

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It turned out, the man had earlier robbed a nearby liquor store at knifepoint.

Police Insp. John Morrison, while grateful no on was injured in the attacked, said “this incident serves as a stark reminder of the dangers all levels of law enforcement face on a daily basis.”

Very true. And we should be grateful to law enforcement and other first responders for their service.

But what this incident does just as clearly is remind Edmontonians why they don’t want to go Downtown, especially on the LRT, and why they don’t want to live there.

One incident like this, particularly a fatal one, can undo a year of fancy planning or tax spending.

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The very first duty of any government, municipal or otherwise, is to keep its citizens safe. But for the last two mayoral administrations, the city’s unrealistic priorities have been ending poverty and ending racism.

Here’s one point on which I disagree with the revitalization coalition. They want to replace the end of poverty and the end of racism with the equally unrealistic goal of making Edmonton the safest city in the country.

Why do all these efforts have to end in pie-in-the-sky objectives?

Just concentrate on making the city noticeably safer than it is now. Drop the utopian hope of making it the safest.

Our current council, though, is reluctant to tackle homelessness and open drug consumption. In their minds even the people creating chaos in our streets are citizens. They have rights, too, such as not feeling harassed. But until council can overcome such soft-hearted beliefs, none of their other goals for Downtown will amount to much.

Council could also make Downtown a low-tax or no-tax district to encourage developers and residents. But that’s as unlikely to happen as a crackdown on addicts and street people. In council’s minds everyone should pay for all their good ideas such as LRT, bike and bus lanes and a “green” sustainability strategy.

However, until council deals with the very basic objective of greater safer for Downtown workers and residents, they’ll never revitalize Downtown.

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